Artist Jacolby Satterwhite gets profiled in Complex this week, as his contributions to a new Solange video has earned him impressive attention.  “I’ve been doing small projects with Saint Heron for the past couple of years,” he says. “I did a video installation for her creative collective Saint Heron at the Metropolitan Museum about three years ago. And just other miscellaneous stuff. Eventually she reached out to me to produce a film for this.” (more…)

In the face of a no-deal Brexit, British museums and galleries are rushing to ship works to and from the European Union (EU) before the exit deadline of March 29th. “We are covering our backs because no decision has been made yet, but we are looking at an enormous amount of money to reimport incredibly expensive works. It’s crippling,” says a gallery spokesman for Tornabuoni Arte.” (more…)

Hank Willis Thomas has been tapped to design a memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Art News reports. “Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King are monumental examples of the capacity of love to shape society,” he said. “I can only hope The Embrace can be a reminder and a call to action to each of us to never forget what they’ve taught us.” (more…)

Jim Shaw, The Potato Family (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw returns to New York with a series of five new paintings, united under the name The Family Romance.  Continuing the artist’s penchant for blending personal, political, and surreal narratives, the show traces Shaw’s interests in behavioral psychology and themes surrounding the family unit. (more…)

Alighiero Boetti, Per Nuovi Desideri (1988), via Repetto

As the winter months drags slowly to its conclusion, and the weather shifts into more temperate conditions, New York City will once again step into its role as a central hub of the contemporary art market, and the global art fair circuit, kicking off its string of fairs across the city.  Centering around the annual Armory Show Art Fair on the West Side, the week serves as one of the more important selling weeks of the first half of 2019. (more…)

Seth Price at Petzel, via Art Observed

Marking the first entry in the busy weeks of March in New York, the ADAA Art Show opened its doors this week, putting a few days between its own fair and the mass of exhibitors opening their doors in the coming days.  The first week of March is always a packed one for gallerists and artists, with the usual string of exhibitions and openings coupled with the ever-growing number of art fairs taking up space across the city during Armory Art Week.  With that in mind, the ADAA’s attempts at putting some space between its event and the rest of March’s bustling pace has made it a fitting first entry, a considered, careful staging that sets the tone for the days to come. (more…)

Christie’s will offer Robert Rauschenberg’s Buffalo II at auction this May in New York, carrying a $50 estimate that should smash the artist’s current record. “Everyone has been waiting for this painting,’’ says Sara Friedlander, Christie’s international director and head of its postwar and contemporary art department in New York. “It’s the very best of the silkscreen paintings that’s left in private hands.’’ (more…)

Damien Hirst has unveiled a specially-designed suite at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. “I love what Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta have done with the Palms,” Hirst said in a statement. “It’s amazing being able to work with them because they are great collectors and totally understand art. They have allowed me to create a suite in the hotel and design everything and completely fill it with my art.” (more…)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has tapped Rita Gonzalez, a long-running curator at the museum, as its new head of contemporary art.  (more…)

Matthew Barney gets a profile in Art News this week, as he recaps his recently completed new film Redoubt, and reflects on its dwellings on alchemy, animals and the unknown. “The new film is very different,” he says. “It’s an American narrative, a kind of portrait of a region.” (more…)

A work by Carmen Herrera, Blanco Y Verde (1966–67), has set a new auction record of $2.9 million at a charity auction at Sotheby’s this past week.  (more…)

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has tapped Janet Bishop its new chief curator, Art News reports, alongside a number of other appointments.   “We are so fortunate to have Janet and Chad [Coerver, the museum’s new chief education and community engagement officer], two leaders with rich experience, strong relationships with the art community, expansive institutional knowledge and years of producing critically-acclaimed projects, ready to inspire and lead our teams to advance the goals of our new strategic plan.” (more…)

Josephine Meckseper, Scene VI (Installation View), via Art Observed

Few artists have continued to explore the overlapping languages of commerce, visual art and the attendant formats of culture that lay somewhere between the two in the same manner as Josephine Meckseper.  Frequently incorporating the languages of commercial display in conjunction with references to film and painting, her works are confounding arrangements of both corporeal bodies and abstracted agents, each contending for the viewer’s attention in strange, often foreign ways. For her current show, on view at Timothy Taylor in New York, the artist brings a set from her own film, PELLEA[S]. (more…)

The New York Times profiles Jan Six in a recent profile, the Dutch aristocrat who discovered a pair of unattributed Rembrandt works.  “What sets Rembrandt apart is his ability to paint the person,” he says. “When I go through a museum and there’s a Rembrandt, I’ll pass it the way you do a person, looking out of the corner of my eye, thinking, Oh, who’s that? like it might be somebody I know. It’s a living human being.”  (more…)

Dealer Alexander Khochinsky has been detained by French authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport.  Khochinsky has been engaged in an ongoing dispute with the Polish government over the ownership of an Antoine Pesne painting, Girl with Dove (1754). (more…)

Sotheby’s reported net income of $85.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2018 today during a call with investors, marking a 12 percent increase over the $76.7 million earned during the same period in 2017.  (more…)

Artist David Hockney found himself trapped in an elevator yesterday in Amsterdam yesterday, after an overloaded carriage stopped between floors.  The artist was rescued by Dutch firefighters.  (more…)

French dealer Marc Labarbe will auction off the recently rediscovered Caravaggio painting Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1607), carrying a €150 million (about $171 million) estimate.  The work’s authenticity has been called into question in past years. (more…)

The Rothko Chapel in Houston will close for the first step of a $30 million restoration and campus expansion by Architecture Research Office. “We’re trying to restore the sanctity of the chapel, very close to what my father had intended for the space,” says Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son who is steering the building committee and capital campaign. (more…)

Paul Signac, Le Port au soleil couchant, Opus 236 (Saint-Tropez) (1892), Final Price: £19,501,250 via Christie’s

Over the course of the last two evenings in London, the major auction houses rounded out an uneven, occasionally disappointing series of sales in the British capital, casting some doubts over the prolonged strength of the Impressionist and Modernist market in the UK, EU and beyond.  Missing out on major fireworks at both houses, save for a few auction records already anticipated to fall, the evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s have posed some hard questions regarding the market’s current health, and just how markets are responding to an increasingly foggy Brexit picture.

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The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal has tapped former MOCA head Philippe Vergne as its next director. “Philippe Vergne brings to Serralves an extraordinary expertise in contemporary art and culture, as well as in museum management,” Serralves board president Ana Pinho said in a statement.  (more…)

Turkish-Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan has been released from a Turkish jail after 25 months.  Dogan was convicted of “spreading terrorist propaganda” according to a Turkish court.  “I was waiting for the day when my sentence would come to an end, I am very happy. I extend my thanks to every single person who supported me during this process,” Dogan said. (more…)

The exhibition of the Barack and Michelle Obama Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery has grown the museum’s attendance by leaps and bounds, with 1 million more tickets sold this past year than the year prior, the Washington Post reports.  “I thought this is the closest that I’ll probably ever get to [Obama], and of what he represented — hope and love and progress,” says attendee Kamilah Chambers of Katy, Tex. (more…)

Art News has a piece this week on Pace Gallery‘s recent experimentation with charging admission for its more immersive, digital installations at galleries in Beijing and Palo Alto. “We are pondering it,” says CEO Marc Glimcher. “We are trying to come up with an idea.” (more…)